Role Selection and Team Performance

Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how roles are assigned within teams and how this affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in pairs consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very demanding for buyers and trivial for sellers. Teams perform better when roles are assigned endogenously or teammates are allowed to chat about their decisions, but the interaction effect between endogenous role assignment and chat unexpectedly worsens team performance. We argue that ego depletion provides a likely explanation for this surprising result.

[1]  Jie Bao,et al.  Reasoning , 2008, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[2]  Jesús Crespo-Cuaresma,et al.  Business cycle convergence in EMU: A first look at the second moment , 2013 .

[3]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Equality, Equity and Incentives: An Experiment , 2013, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[4]  M. Hanke,et al.  Football championships and jersey sponsors’ stock prices: an empirical investigation , 2013 .

[5]  P. Raschky,et al.  Uncertainty of Governmental Relief and the Crowding out of Flood Insurance , 2013 .

[6]  M. Kirchler,et al.  Thar She Bursts: Reducing Confusion Reduces Bubbles , 2012 .

[7]  Engelbert Theurl,et al.  Health status convergence at the local level: empirical evidence from Austria , 2011, International journal for equity in health.

[8]  Rupert Sausgruber,et al.  Inequality aversion and voting on redistribution☆ , 2011, European economic review.

[9]  Marco Casari,et al.  When Do Groups Perform Better than Individuals? A Company Takeover Experiment , 2011 .

[10]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  What Drives Taxi Drivers? A Field Experiment on Fraud in a Market for Credence Goods , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[11]  Achim Zeileis,et al.  Generalized Measurement Invariance Tests with Application to Factor Analysis , 2011 .

[12]  Francesco Feri,et al.  Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from A Randomized Natural Experiment: Comment , 2011 .

[13]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age -- An experiment in Austria and Sweden , 2011 .

[14]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  The Development of Egalitarianism, Altruism, Spite and Parochialism in Childhood and Adolescence , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[15]  Engelbert Theurl,et al.  Entry and Exit of Physicians in a two-tiered public/private Health Care System , 2011 .

[16]  Engelbert Theurl,et al.  Socioeconomic Environment and Mortality: A two-level Decomposition by Sex and Cause of Death , 2010 .

[17]  D. Budescu,et al.  Teams Make You Smarter: Learning and Knowledge Transfer in Auctions and Markets by Teams and Individuals , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[18]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Strategic Sophistication of Adolescents: Evidence from Experimental Normal-Form Games , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[19]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Gender, Competition and the Efficiency of Policy Interventions , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[20]  Nikolaus Umlauf,et al.  Comparing penalized splines and fractional polynomials for flexible modelling of the effects of continuous predictor variables , 2010, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[21]  Michael Kirchler,et al.  Trading strategies and trading profits in experimental asset markets with cumulative information , 2010 .

[22]  M. Sutter,et al.  Strategic Sophistication of Individuals and Teams in Experimental Normal-Form Games , 2010, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[23]  John H. Kagel,et al.  The Role of Context and Team Play in Cross-Game Learning , 2009 .

[24]  Edi Karni,et al.  On the Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment: New Experimental Evidence , 2008, Games Econ. Behav..

[25]  Tsun Chow,et al.  A survey study of critical success factors in agile software projects , 2008, J. Syst. Softw..

[26]  Dan Levin,et al.  The Origin of the Winner's Curse: A Laboratory Study , 2007 .

[27]  Brit Grosskopf,et al.  On the Robustness of the Winner's Curse Phenomenon , 2007 .

[28]  Boris Maciejovsky,et al.  Collective induction without cooperation? Learning and knowledge transfer in cooperative groups and competitive auctions. , 2007, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[29]  Matthew O. Jackson,et al.  Group Play in Games and the Role of Consent in Network Formation , 2006, J. Econ. Theory.

[30]  Wolfgang J. Luhan,et al.  Group polarization in the team dictator game reconsidered , 2006 .

[31]  J. Morgan,et al.  Are Two Heads Better Than One?: Monetary Policy by Committee , 2005 .

[32]  J. Kagel,et al.  Are Two Heads Better Than One? Team versus Individual Play in Signaling Games , 2005 .

[33]  M. Kocher,et al.  The Decision Maker Matters: Individual Versus Group Behaviour in Experimental Beauty-Contest Games , 2005 .

[34]  N. Kerr,et al.  Group performance and decision making. , 2004, Annual review of psychology.

[35]  K. Vohs,et al.  Intellectual performance and ego depletion: role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[36]  Charles A. Holt,et al.  Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects , 2002 .

[37]  Richard J. Zeckhauser,et al.  Action Bias and Environmental Decisions , 2000 .

[38]  U. Fischbacher.  z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments , 1999 .

[39]  Casey Ichniowski,et al.  The Effects of Human Resource Management Systems on Economic Performance: An International Comparison of U.S. and Japanese Plants , 1999 .

[40]  Ilan Yaniv,et al.  Individual and Group Behavior in the Ultimatum Game: Are Groups More "Rational" Players? , 1998 .

[41]  R. Baumeister,et al.  Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[42]  J. H. Davis,et al.  Some compelling intuitions about group consensus decisions, theoretical and empirical research, and interpersonal aggregation phenomena: Selected examples 1950-1990 , 1992 .

[43]  John Orbell,et al.  Explaining discussion-induced cooperation. , 1988 .

[44]  Clive R. Bagshaw.  Are two heads better than one? , 1987, Nature.

[45]  B. Foss.  New Horizons in Psychology 1 , 1966 .

[46]  Herbert Solomon,et al.  Two models of group behavior in the solution of eureka-type problems , 1955 .

[47]  International Environmental Agreement on Open Access Resources , 2011 .

[48]  Nikolaus Umlauf,et al.  Applications of Multilevel Structured Additive Regression Models to Insurance Data , 2010, COMPSTAT.

[49]  Marco Casari,et al.  Department of Economics Working Paper Series Do Groups Fall Prey to the Winner's Curse? , 2009 .

[50]  Jesús Crespo-Cuaresma,et al.  Business cycle convergence in EMU : A first look at the second moment ∗ , 2006 .

[51]  Ben Greiner,et al.  An Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments , 2004 .

[52]  Brit Grosskopf,et al.  Overcoming the Winner's Curse: An Adaptive Learning Perspective , 2002 .

[53]  Moyra Williams,et al.  New Horizons in Psychology , 1966, Mental Health.

[54]  F. Carlsson,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Household Decision Making in Rural China: Using Experiments to Estimate the Influences of Spouses Household Decision Making in Rural China: Using Experiments to Estimate the Influences of Spouses , 2022 .

[55]  Wolfgang A. Brunauer,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Modeling House Prices Using Multilevel Structured Additive Regression Modeling House Prices Using Multilevel Structured Additive Regression , 2022 .

[56]  M. Gächter,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Stronger Sex but Earlier Death: a Multi-level Socioeconomic Analysis of Gender Differences in Mortality in Austria Stronger Sex but Earlier Death: a Multi-level Socioeconomic Analysis of Gender Differences in Mortality in Austria , 2022 .

[57]  L. Goette,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Group Membership, Competition, and Altruistic versus Antisocial Punishment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Army Groups Group Membership, Competition, and Altruistic versus Antisocial Punishment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Army Groups , 2022 .

[58]  P. Raschky,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Uncertainty of Governmental Relief and the Crowding out of Insurance Uncertainty of Governmental Relief and the Crowding out of Insurance , 2022 .

[59]  Martin Larch,et al.  liquidity: Evidence from the euro zone , 2022 .

[60]  M. Gächter,et al.  Retaining the Thin Blue Line: What Shapes Workers' Intentions not to Quit the Current Work Environment , 2010 .

[61]  M. Kocher,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Impatience and Uncertainty: Experimental Decisions Predict Adolescents' Field Behavior , 2022 .

[62]  J. Qiu,et al.  Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Guilt from Promise-breaking and Trust in Markets for Expert Services -theory and Experiment Guilt from Promise-breaking and Trust in Markets for Expert Services – Theory and Experiment * , 2022 .